[WARNING: Big fat spoiler looming within; bail out of the
penultimate parenthetical after the word "Quaid" if you don't want to know
how it ends]

First scene, post-credits: Jim Caviezel watches forlornly as his live-in
girlfriend packs her stuff. "So you're gonna leave, just like that?" he
says. "I've been leaving for six months," she says. "You just didn't
notice." By the time I've recovered from that exchange -- thank christ the
pre-med two rows down had lugged her defibrillator to the theater --
they've moved on to the gist of their quandary. "I want to change, but I
just can't," he says. "No, you won't change," she says. "That's
what hurts so much." All dialogue approximate, but you get the
idea: Blecccchhhh. A few mildly clever plot twists (most of which I
predicted, but in a pleasant, prophecy-fulfilled kinda way rather than an
irritating, foregone-conclusion kinda way) rendered the rest of the film
semi-watchable, but didn't remotely compensate for all the clumsy
touchy-feeliness; a slew of utterly ludicrous paradoxes, meanwhile (so,
what, Quaid spends the next thirty years knowing that someday he'll
have to drop by junior's place with a shotgun? and if so, wouldn't he have
been lying in wait before the dude even got there? and in fact, wouldn't
the dude have long since been jailed, if not executed? and hey, wait a
minute, etc. etc. ad inf.), confirms that the Twelve Monkeys model
of time travel, in which it's impossible to alter past events (because
you've already "altered" them), is the only one that makes a damn bit of
sense. Although, should temporal modification ever become a reality, I may
well hop back to 1998 and warn Quaid not to attempt that atrocious
lov'ble-Noo-Yawk-lug accent.

Gladiator (Ridley Scott): A-

Believe me, you're no more surprised than I was. Simply the most
satisfying and invigorating big-budget summer event movie in years -- a
gloriously dumb throwback to the days when the word "postmodern" still
sounded like the oxymoron that it is; when the story received as much
emphasis as the special effects; when even the Technicolor pictures were
morally b&w -- heroes impossibly noble and courageous, villains festering
with incestuous desire. Not since the original Terminator, or
possibly Raiders of the Lost Ark, has my response to a movie of
this sort been so unselfconsciously childlike. When you think about it,
popcorn movies have to walk an exceedingly thin tightrope, with chasms
representing pretentiousness and stupidity yawning on either side: we
don't really want them to traffic in moral complexity (which would get in
the way of our rooting interest in the hero), but we don't want our
intelligence actively insulted, either, thanks
muchly. Gladiator gets the tone exactly right, conveying simple,
damn near mythic dramatic tropes with a conviction that simply cannot be
faked. Plus, no Charlton Heston! His extra 38 Wigand-pounds now ancient
history, Crowe is every inch the taciturn hunk o' beef that the role
demands; at the same time, he brings to it both a shrewdness and a
guttural sensitivity that transcend the script's occasional limitations,
and elevate what might, in other hands, have been corny lines or
clichéd gestures into moments that are truly iconic. (On paper,
his big second-act speech -- basically a florid variation on the standard
"I'm comin' to get you, motherfucker" threat that Stallone growled at
least once in every Rambo flick -- is just unbelievably hokey; hearing
the words spoken in Crowe's measured, steely cadence, it was all I could
do to restrain myself from standing up and cheering.) Visuals
characteristically stunning, juxtaposing claustrophobic, torchlit
interiors with frantic battle scenes that play like a less elegiac
version of the Normandy Beach sequence from Saving Private Ryan
(stern finger-waggling, thankfully, is kept to a minimum, with perhaps
thirty seconds expended on drawing a connection between the capacity
Colosseum crowds and the popcorn-munching multiplex audience; somewhere,
Michael Haneke is screaming). But then, Black Rain looked
fabulous, too, and who besides Catherine Zeta-Jones wants to see that
again? No, what sets Gladiator apart is its...spareness, for lack
of a better word. You give a damn whether the hero wins or loses,
succeeds or fails, lives or dies. It's that simple -- and, sadly, that
rare. [TONY #241]

The New Eve (Catherine
Corsini): B-

Not a good sign, methinks, when an actor as relentlessly affable as Sergi
Lopez walks up to your protagonist in the final reel and decks her in the
face, hard enough to land her in the hospital, and you can actually hear
people in the theater straining not to applaud. (Okay, so maybe I was
projecting.) Alternately assaulting and cajoling everybody in sight,
Karin Viard's Camille is without a doubt the most memorably volatile
spitfire to command the screen in ages; but while Corsini is ostensibly
critical of her heroine's increasingly irrational behavior -- yes, it's
yet another tale of l'amour fou, subdivision: Self-Destructive
Obsession with Married Man -- she's more often prone to glorify it,
particularly w/r/t the film's nauseatingly sunny denouement. (Plus,
Pierre-Loup Rajot does such a superb job of portraying Alexis as grounded
and dependable early on that it's simply mystifying when he suddenly
begins to look at Camille as if she were made of milk chocolate.) Those
who swoon at the notion of damn-the-torpedoes desire are in for a
treat; those who believe, as I do, that infatuation doesn't automatically
preclude maturity are less -- or perhaps more -- likely to roll with the
punches. [TONY #241]

Love & Basketball (Gina
Prince-Bythewood): C

Why people are getting excited about -- or are even remotely tolerant of
-- this painfully earnest, schematically plotted, eminently predictable,
indifferently shot after-school special beats the hell outta me. It's
exactly as memorable and inventive as its title. (Tolstoy schmolstoy, I'm
making a point here. Who let you in, anyway? Got any ID?)

The Virgin Suicides
(Sofia Coppola): C+

How apropos that the soundtrack is courtesy of Air, given the sheer
weightlessness of this intelligent and assured but sorely misguided
adaptation of what I'm told is a truly haunting book.* "Remove the normal emphases on character,
plot and setting, and what's left?" asks Godfrey Cheshire in his (rave) review; my
answer: precious little, apart from wistful lyricism so thick
(WARNING: Elvis Mitchell homage imminent) that it could choke a team of
mules wearing vintage WWII gas masks, which I fear just ain't enough for
me. On the page, it's possible to get away with employing a collective
omniscient protagonist in a tale that's about misplaced idealization; on
the screen, however, what you wind up with is a story that's
about...nobody, really. In theory, it's about the group of boys
who love the Lisbon girls from afar; without the interior monologue as a
guide, however, footholds for the befuddled viewer are few and far
between. Coppola's images, while ably chosen, don't take up the
slack, essentially becoming subservient to Giovanni Ribisi's
intermittent narration of Eugenides' graceful prose; and the movie winds
up feeling, as so many adaptations of first-rate books do, more like a
really complex FotoNovel than a stand-alone work of art. Or, I dunno --
maybe it's just that I can't quite surrender myself to an ode to five
blandly dewy-eyed damsels who perpetually look like they're killing time
at a casting call for a Breck ad. If nothing else, however, Ms. Coppola
has now earned the right to give the finger to everybody who dismissed
her as nepotism's poster child after New York Stories and
Godfather III.

* (I use the phrase "which I haven't
read" so frequently on this site that I sometimes fear that y'all assume
me to be some sub-literate cretin who does nothing but sit glassy-eyed in
front of various screens all day every day -- not that that's so
far from the mark -- so indulge me for a second while I
self-aggrandizingly mention that I'm currently in the middle of (a) Graham
Greene's The Heart of the Matter; (b) Daniel C. Dennett's
Consciousness Explained; and (c) Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius. Thanks, I feel ever so much
better.)

Committed (Lisa Krueger): C

More mannered quirkiness from Ms. Krueger, whose Manny and Lo similarly drowned a potentially
compelling premise in a sea of distractingly wacky asides. I gave up on
this one early on, about the time that Casey Affleck started trying to
make out with Heather Graham, playing his sister, and she responded not
with alarm or confusion but with amused exasperation, good-naturedly
reminding him of their pronounced genetic similarity. ("You know what
this exploration of the meaning and ramifications of unconditional
devotion really could use? Some random incest
humor!" Earth...to...Lisa...) Our determined heroine, meanwhile, despite
heroic efforts by Graham and by Krueger's script to make her delightfully
spunky, ultimately comes across like a deluded, monomaniacal twit, and
the movie methodically builds to a facile bit of wordplay (think about
other possible scenarios suggested by the title -- bingo, you got
it) that bears unfavorable comparison to the most labored variety of
shaggy-dog tale. The rollicking, percussion-heavy score by Calexico is a
keeper, however, and Goran Visnjic provides further support for my thesis
that the sexiest men on the planet hail from what used to be
Yugoslavia; I'm about a 2 on Dave Eggers' orientation scale (on which 1
is perfectly straight, 10 perfectly gay), but I shifted over to roughly a
3.5 during a couple of Visnjic's scenes. (No worries, sjl.) [TONY #240, along with Timecode]

Timecode (Mike Figgis): C

"You know what? You know what, guys? We don't need all this development
bullshit. With these lightweight digital cameras they have now, we could
just go out and make a movie tomorrow. Script? To hell with the
script. Let's round up some great actors, give 'em a basic scenario of
some kind -- hell, we could set it right here in Hollywood, make it about
a movie audition, keep it simple -- and just let 'em improvise the whole
thing, they're smart people. More truthful that way. We could have maybe,
I dunno, let's say four main characters, and a camera could just follow
each of them around continuously for the entire length of a feature film,
no cuts whatsoever -- that way we'll find out what's left once we've
eliminated the medium's single most powerful tool. And instead of me
playing the little dictator and juxtaposing the images myself, what we'll
do is we'll put all four up onscreen simultaneously, so that each
individual audience member can choose for him or herself which portion of
the frame to look at at any given moment. I mean, I can manipulate the
sound mix a little, sort of as a guide, but basically there'll be four
interrelated stories taking place at once. It'll be a new kind of cinema
for the 21st century: all digital, entirely improvised, no fascist
editing, and people get to kind of make their own movie as if they were
standing at a salad bar. And we'll just shoot it over and over again until
we get a version that really cooks. Whaddaya say?"

Bad Idea

Top of the Food Chain
(John Paizs): B

So who's the funniest American actor currently working? A few years ago,
I might have plumped for Jim Carrey; more recently, Mike Myers' portrayal
of Dr. Evil (and, to a much lesser extent, Austin Powers) has forced a
record number of embarrassingly loud guffaws to escape my larynx. (I'm
still mildly amazed that none of the folks who saw International Man
of Mystery with me walked over afterwards to say, "dude, it just
wasn't that funny.") If I had to vote today, however, I'd be
sorely tempted to name Campbell Scott, based on his sublimely ludicrous
turn as a German martinet in Stanley Tucci's The Impostors and his dead-on deadpan
delivery as an atomic scientist in this agreeably zany spoof of '50s
sci-fi classics. Paizs relies a bit too heavily on non sequiturs (though
some of them, like the never-explained secret in the hero's bathtub, are
admittedly pretty hilarious), and the picture runs out of steam well
before the closing credits, as spoofs are wont to do; give me Scott
repeatedly referring with an imposingly straight face to "the lumpy hilly
bumpy part of town outside of town," however, or a scene in which he
transforms what would normally be a momentary chuckle and the words "no,
no" into a minute-long symphony of jolly contradiction (this one you have
to see for yourself), and I'm yours for the evening. No distributor as
yet in the U.S., but don't fret -- cult status clearly awaits. It could
use a more patently ridiculous title, though, I think.

Love's Labour's Lost
(Kenneth Branagh): C+

Let's begin with the number of talented actors in the English-speaking
world -- a reasonably largish figure. If we then limit ourselves to the
number of talented actors in the English-speaking world who excel at
rattling off Shakespearean verse, of course, the number dwindles
considerably; and if we further whittle it down to include only those
talented English-speaking iambic-pentameter-adroit actors who are
additionally capable of belting out show tunes and dazzling the
audience with fancy footwork...well, I'm not really sure how many
qualified candidates we're talking about, frankly, but I can tell
you that not a single solitary one of 'em is in this movie (though Nathan
Lane, to his considerable credit, comes pretty darn close). So enamored
am I of Branagh's basic idea here (if not of his song selection -- every
'30s standard that Woody Allen has ever rejected as "too obvious" is
present and accounted for), and so eager am I in general to see the
musical triumphantly reborn, that it just about kills me to have to
report that each number or routine stops the movie cold. The actors are
game, but they just don't have the chops; it's like watching a really
exuberant high school production, especially when Alicia Silverstone
and/or Matthew Lillard are onscreen. (Lillard, in particular, must've
been foisted on Branagh by worried execs, as a herculean effort is made
to hide, compensate for, or simply ignore him.) Only when Branagh and
Natascha McElhone are alone together does the picture momentarily come
truly alive; any chance we can put them in a film of As You Like
It while we're waiting for a new generation of Astaires and Kellys
and Garlands to be trained?

U-571 (Jonathan Mostow): C

"Take her down to 160 meters," orders Callow Replacement Skipper Matthew
McConaughey. "But that's over 500 feet!" protests Expository Metric
Conversion Expert Harvey Keitel. Most of the dialogue isn't quite that
laughable, admittedly, but the lean, mean concision that Mostow
demonstrated in Breakdown has been
replaced by typical studio-style pandering -- you can almost hear the
story conferences in the background, clueless execs offering sage advice
like "listen: since the climax involves the captain making a tough
decision, shouldn't we maybe have a scene near the beginning where
somebody spends like five minutes lecturing him about how leadership is
all about making tough decisions, and suggesting that maybe he doesn't
have the cojones to let the chips fall where they may when the going gets
rough, and that way at the end when we see his cojones in action it's more
of a satisfying payoff kind of deal, wouldn't that be good?" Yesterday, I
could have said in all honesty that I'd never met a submarine flick I
didn't like -- I even kinda dug Tony Scott's sub movie, fer cryin'
out loud! -- but this one is just depressingly rote: action scenes a
generic hodgepodge of quick-cut shakycam and flying rivets; plot little
more than an excuse for additional shakycam; characterization so hastily
minimalist that most of the poor swabs weren't even issued their customary
Single Defining Trait. Breaking the Code is a more exciting
depiction of the Allies' attempts to crack the Enigma, and that's a
talky, dense play about a stammering mathematician. Though I don't
believe any production to date has featured that hunky Jon Bon
Jovi... [TONY #239]

East-West
(Est-Ouest) (Régis Wargnier): B-

"Sweeping" is a word folks seem to be associating with this resolutely
old-fashioned historical melodrama, but I'd substitute "sprawling": it's a
movie that has no qualms about getting nice and comfy and telling you the
whole affair, every detail...except for the very many static
boring parts, which are airily dismissed with a quick swig from the bottle
and an emphatic "Now then:" TWO YEARS LATER, ONE YEAR LATER, TWO MONTHS
LATER, HALF A DOZEN FREAKIN' YEARS LATER AND TIME FOR A NEW ACTOR IN THE
ROLE OF THE NEARLY MUTE SON WHO HAS NO PERCEPTIBLE NARRATIVE FUNCTION --
was that the N train rumbling beneath my seat, or was it Aristotle
shifting restlessly in his pine box? Terminal choppiness notwithstanding,
something this gloriously fusty is awfully hard for a nostalgia-prone
movie buff to resist (which probably explains its Oscar nomination a few
months back), especially with rock-solid Sandrine Bonnaire and the
increasingly charismatic Sergei Bodrov Jr. as anchors -- not to mention
Bodrov's recurring co-star Oleg Menshikov (call this one Prisoner of
the Russkies) doing a fine brooding-martyr routine, plus Catherine
Deneuve occasionally flouncing in to briefly lend her inimitable
Deneuvitude to the already lush proceedings. A few additional shades of
gray would have been welcome, though -- the Stalinist stooge who hounds
our heroine is a dead ringer for that fey Raiders of the Lost Ark
Nazi who winds up with half the Well of the Souls instructions burned into
his palm -- and Patrick Doyle's insistent score would have been a nuisance
even back in 1966.

American Psycho (Mary
Harron): C

Monotonously repetitive, driving home the same rather glib satirical
observation -- Bateman as a product/symbol of '80s greed and vanity --
again and again and again, albeit via a wide variety of different power
tools. In spite of Harron's undeniable visual flair and admirable
restraint (it's not as gory as you'd expect), this story clearly belonged
on the page if it belonged anywhere at all (haven't read the book); the
juxtaposition of Bateman's murderous impulses with his breathless paeans
to some of the decade's most aggressively banal pop music might make
hilarious journal entries, but they just don't work when delivered as
extemporaneous monologues. Bale does what he can with his non-character
(Leo would've been a disaster), and there's one genuinely brilliant scene
in which the font styles and comparative levels of embossment on business
cards form the basis of an increasingly anxious game of one-upmanship (the
subtext could scarcely be clearer if these guys actually unzipped their
flies and produced a ruler), but ultimately it all feels as hollow as its
subject's ostentatiously avaricious lifestyle. [TONY
#238]

Rules of Engagement
(William Friedkin): C-

The expectorant sound you just heard was your faithful correspondent
spitting in unadulterated disgust. A right-wing apologia for military
psychopathology cleverly disguised as a treatise on duty and honor, this
is easily among the most morally repugnant movies I've ever seen; that
the grade is as high as it is, in spite of the retching it inspired,
serves as a true testament to the skill of old pros like Tommy Lee Jones,
Samuel L. Jackson, and, as the most despicably hissable corrupt authority
figure since Paul Reiser turned the facehuggers loose on Ripley and Newt,
poor ol' Bruce "call me soon, Atom...please" Greenwood. Wish I could say
it was at least somewhat entertaining in its mindless jingoism, but even
the extended fistfight between the two stars felt tired and irrelevant. If
you absolutely must see a movie called Rules of Engagement, go rent
the one that begins with
Waco: The. As a favor to me. [TONY #238]